Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02

by Lord Kelvin's Machine

  So who had taken a shot at me from The Hoisted Pint, from a second-story window, maybe? Or from the roof of the icehouse; that would have served equally well. I thought about the disappeared elephant and about the captain and his "Out West" mannerisms. But why on earth . . .?

  I ordered a third pint, swearing to myself to drink it slowly and then go up to take a nap. I'd done my work for the day; I could leave the rest to Hasbro and St. Ives.

  "I saw Parsons on the pier," I said. "And I talked to Captain Bowker. And I think your woman with the letters is skulking around, probably staying at The Hoisted Pint, down toward the pier." That started it. I told them the whole story, just as it happened—the toy on the table. Parsons in his fishing regalia, the captain jollying me around—and they sat silent throughout, thinking, perhaps, that I'd made a very pretty morning of it while they were off drinking tea and listening to rumors through the window.

  "He thought you were an agent," said St. Ives, referring to Captain Bowker. "Insurance detective. What's he hiding, though, that he wouldn't let you look around the icehouse? This log of his, maybe? Not likely. And why would he try to shoot you? That's not an act calculated to cement the idea of his being innocent. And Parsons here too . . ."St. Ives fell into a study, then thumped his fist on the table, standing up and motioning to Hasbro, who stood up too, and the both of them went out leaving their glasses two-thirds full on the table. Mine was empty again, and I was tempted to pour theirs into mine in order to secure a more profound nap and to avoid waste. But there was the landlady, grinning toward me and the clock just then striking noon.

  She whisked the glasses away with what struck me as a sense of purpose, looking across her spectacles at me. I lurched up the stairs and collapsed into bed, making up for our early rising with a nap that stretched into the late afternoon.

  I WAS UP and pulling on my shoes when there was a knock on the door. It's St. Ives, I thought, while I was stepping across to throw it open. It might as easily have been the man with the gun—something that occurred to me when the door was halfway open. And for a moment I was tempted to slam it shut, cursing myself for a fool and thinking at the same time that half opening the door and then slamming it in the visitor's face would paint a fairly silly picture of me, unless, of course, it was the man with the gun . . .

  It wasn't. It was a man I had never seen before. He was tall, gaunt, and stooped, almost cadaverous. He wore a hat, but it was apparent that he was bald on top and didn't much bother to cut the tufts of hair above his ears. He would have made a pretty scarecrow. There were deep furrows around his lips, the result of a lifetime of pursing them, I suppose, which is just what he was doing now, glaring down his hooked nose at me as if he didn't quite approve of the look on my face.

  Afternoon naps always put me in a wretched mood, and the sight of him doubled it. "You've apparently got the wrong room," I said, and started to shut the door. He put his foot in the way.

  "I'm an insurance agent," he said, glancing back down the hallway. "Lloyd's. There's a question or two ..."

  "Of course," I said. So that was it. Captain Bowker was under investigation. I swung the door open and in he came, looking around the room with a slightly appalled face, as if the place was littered with dead pigs, say, and they were starting to stink. I didn't like him at all, insurance agent or not.

  He started in on me, grilling me, as they say. "You were seen talking to Captain Bowker today."

  I nodded.

  "About what?"

  "Ice," I said. "My name is Adam Benbow, from up in Harrogate. I'm a fish importer down on holiday."

  He nodded. He was easier to fool than the captain had been. I was bothered, though, by the vague suspicion that I had gotten my name wrong. I had, of course. This morning it had been Abner. I could hardly correct it, though, not now. And how would he know anyway? What difference did my name make to him?

  "We're investigating the incident of the downed ship. Did you talk to him about that?"

  "Which ship?"

  "The Landed Catch, sunk off Dover days ago. What do you know about that ship?"

  "Not a thing. I read about it in the papers, of course. Who hasn't?"

  "Are you acquainted with a man named Langdon St. Ives?" he asked abruptly. He half spun around when he said this, as if to take me by surprise.

  It worked, too. I sputtered there for a moment, blinking at him. And when I said, "Langdon who?" the attempt was entirely worthless. I was as transparent as window glass.

  He acted as if I had admitted everything. "We believe that Mr. St. Ives is also investigating the business of the Landed Catch, and we're wondering why."

  "I'm sure I don't know. Who was it again? Saint what?" It was worthless pretending, and I knew it. I had to dummy up, though. I wasn't about to answer the man's questions. St. Ives could do that for himself. On the other hand, I suppose it was pointless to insist that I didn't know St. Ives. The man was onto my game, what with the false names and the Harrogate business.

  "What did you see, exactly, at the icehouse?"

  ''See? Nothing. The man wouldn't allow me in. He seemed anxious, to tell you the truth. Like he didn't want me snooping around. He has something to hide there; you can take that much from me."

  "Something to hide, you think?"

  "Bank on it."

  The man nodded, suddenly jolly, grinning at me. "I think you're right," he said. "He's hiding something horrible, is what I think. These are dangerous waters. Very rocky and shallow. He's a subtle man, Captain Bowker is. My advice is to steer clear of him. Leave him to us. He'll be in Newgate Prison waiting to swing, if only for this morning's shooting."

  I must have jerked my eyes open when he said this last, for he grinned at the look on my face and nodded, pursing his lips so that his mouth almost disappeared. "You were a lucky man," he said. "But you're safe now. We're onto him, watching him from every angle. You don't have to hide in your room like this."

  "I wasn't hiding, actually. I . . ."

  "Of course, you weren't," he said, turning toward the door. "Quite a welcome you've had. Don't blame you. Look me up. Binker Street."

  He was out the door then, striding away down the hall. I shut the door and sat on the edge of the bed, studying things out. I understood nothing—less than before. I was vaguely happy, though, that someone was watching the captain. Of course it must have been him who had fired the shot—him and his cowboy upbringing and all. Much more likely than my hansom cab lunatic. I could see that now.

  There was another knocking on the door. It's the agent, I thought, back again. But it wasn't. It was the landlady with a basket of fruit. What a pleasant surprise, I remember thinking, taking the basket from her. "Grape?" I asked, but she shook her head.

  "There's a note in it," she said, nodding at the basket.

  From Dorothy, I thought, suddenly glad that I'd made the reservation at The Hoisted Pint. Absence was making hearts grow fonder. And quickly, too. I'd only left that morning. There was the corner of an envelope, sticking up through the purple grapes and wedged in between a couple of tired-looking apples. The whole lot of fruit lay atop a bed of coconut fiber in a too-heavy and too-deep basket.

  It was the muffled ticking that did the trick, though—the ticking of an infernal machine, hidden in the basket of fruit.

  My breath caught, and I nearly dropped the basket and leaped out the door. But I couldn't do that. It would bring down the hotel, probably with me still in it. I hopped across to the window, looking down on what must have been a half-dozen people, including St. Ives and Hasbro, who were right then heading up the steps. I couldn't just pitch it out onto everybody's heads.

  So I sprinted for the door, yanking it open and leaping out into the hallway. My heart slammed away, flailing like an engine, and without bothering to knock I threw open the door to the room kitty-corner to my own, and surprised an old man who sat in a chair next to a fortuitously open casement, reading a book.

  It was Parsons, not wearing his fishing g
arb anymore.

  Aloft in a Balloon

  PARSONS LEAPED UP, wild with surprise to see me rushing at him like that, carrying my basket. "It's a bomb!" I shouted. "Step aside!" and I helped him do it, too, with my elbow. He sprawled toward the bed, and I swung the basket straight through the open casement and into the bay in a long, low arc. If there had been boats roundabout, I believe I would have let it go anyway. It wasn't an act of heroics by that time; it was an act of desperation, of getting the ticking basket out of my hand and as far away from me as possible.

  It exploded. Wham! Just like that, a foot above the water, which geysered up around the sailing fragments of basket and fruit. Everything rained down, and then there was the splashing back and forth of little colliding waves. Parsons stood behind me, taking in the whole business, half scowling, half surprised. I took a couple of calming breaths, but they did precious little good. My hand—the one that had held the basket— was shaking treacherously, and I sat down hard in Parsons's chair.

  "Sorry," I said to him. "Didn't mean to barge in." But he waved it away as if he saw the necessity of it. It was obvious that the device had been destined to go out through the window and into the sea. There had been no two ways about it. I could hardly have tucked it under my coat and forgotten about it. He stared for a moment out the window and then said, ''Down on holiday," in a flat voice, repeating what I'd said to him on the pier that morning and demonstrating that, like everyone else, he had seen through me all along. I cleared my throat, thinking in a muddle, and just then, as if to save me, St. Ives and Hasbro rushed in, out of breath because of having sprinted up the stairs when they'd heard the explosion.

  The sight of Parsons standing there struck St. Ives dumb, I believe. The professor knew that Parsons was lurking roundabout, because I'd told him, but here, at the Apple? And what had Parsons to do with the explosion, and what had I to do with Parsons?

  There was no use this time in Parsons's simply muttering, "Good day," and seeing us all out the door. It was time for talking turkey, as Captain Bowker would have put it. Once again, I was the man with the information. I told them straight off about the insurance agent.

  "And he knew my name?" said St. Ives, cocking his head.

  "That's right. He seemed to know ..." I stopped and glanced at Parsons, who was listening closely.

  St. Ives continued for me. "He made sure who you were, and he found out that you had suspicions about what was going on at the icehouse, and then he left. And a moment later the basket arrived."

  I nodded and started to tell the story my way, to put the right edge on it, but St. Ives turned to Parsons and, without giving me half a chance, said, "See here. We're not playing games anymore. I'm going to tell you, flat out and without my beating about the bush, that we know about Lord Kelvin's machine being stolen. A baby could piece that business together, what with the debacle down on the Embankment, the flying iron and all. What could that have been but an electromagnet of astonishing strength? There's no use your being coy about it any longer. I've got a sneaking hunch what they've done with it, too. Let's put everything straight. I'll tell you what I know, and you tell me what you know, and together maybe we'll see to the bottom of this murky well."

  Parsons held his hands out in a theatrical gesture of helplessness. "I'm down here to catch a fish," he said. "It's you who are throwing bombs through the window. You seem to attract those sorts of things—bombs and bullets."

  St. Ives gave Parsons a weary glance. Then he said to me, "This agent. Jack, what did he look like?"

  "Tall and thin, and with a hooknose. He was bald under his hat, and his hair stuck out over his ears like a chimney sweep's brush."

  Parsons looked as though he'd been electrocuted. He started to say something, hesitated, started up again, and then, pretending that it didn't much matter to him anyway, said, "Stooped, was he?"

  I nodded.

  "Tiny mouth, like a bird?"

  "That's right."

  Parsons sagged. It was a gesture of resignation. We waited him out. "That wasn't any insurance agent."

  The news didn't surprise anyone. Of course it hadn't been an insurance agent. St. Ives had seen that at once. The man's mind is honed like a knife. Insurance agents don't send bombs around disguised as fruit baskets. We waited for Parsons to tell us who the man was, finally, to quit his tiresome charade, but he stood there chewing it over in his mind, calculating how much he could say.

  Parsons is a good man. I'll say that in the interests of fair play. He and St. Ives have had their differences, but they've both of them been after the same ends, just from different directions. Parsons couldn't abide the notion of people being shot at, even people who tired him as much as I did. So in the end, he told us:

  "It was a man named Higgins."

  "Leopold Higgins!" cried St. Ives. "The ichthyologist. Of course." St. Ives somehow always seemed to know at least half of everything—which is a lot, when you add it up.

  Parsons nodded wearily. "Oxford man. Renegade academician. They're a dangerous breed when they go feral, academics are. Higgins was a chemist, too. Came back from the Orient with insane notions about carp. Insisted that they could be frozen and thawed out, months later, years. You could keep them in a deep freeze, he said. Some sort of glandular excretion, as I understand it, that drained water out of the cells, kept them from bursting when they froze. He was either an expert in cryogenics or a lunatic. It's your choice. He was clearly off his head, though. I think it was opium that did it. He claimed to dream these things.

  "Anyway, it was a glandular business with carp. That was his theory. All of it, mind you, was wrapped up in the notion that it was these secretions that were the secret of the astonishing longevity of a carp. He hadn't been back from China a year when he disappeared. I saw him, in fact, just two days earlier, in London, at the club. He burst in full of wild enthusiasm, asking after old—after people I'd never heard of, saying that he was on the verge of something monumental. And then he was gone—out the door and never seen .again."

  "Until now," said St. Ives.

  "Apparently so."

  St. Ives turned to Hasbro and myself and said, "Our worst fears have come to pass," and then he bowed to Parsons, thanked him very much, and strode out with us following, down the hallway and straightaway to the train station.

  WE SPENT THE NIGHT on the Ostende ferry. I couldn't sleep, thinking about the Landed Catch sinking like a brick just to the south of the very waters we were plowing, and I was ready at the nod of a head to climb into a lifeboat and row away. The next day found us on a train to Amsterdam, and from there on into Germany and Denmark, across the Skaggerak and into Norway. It was an appalling trip, rushing it like that, catching little bits of hurried sleep, and the only thing to recommend it was that there was at least no one trying to kill me anymore, not as long as I was holed up in that train.

  St. Ives was in a funk. A year ago he had made this same weary journey, and had left Narbondo for dead in a freezing tarn near Mount Hjarstaad, which rises out of the Norwegian Sea. Now what was there but evidence that the doctor was alive and up to mischief? It didn't stand to reason, not until Parsons's chatter about cryogenics. Two things were bothering St. Ives, wearing him thinner by the day. One was that somehow he had failed once again. Thwarting Narbondo and diverting the earth from the course of that ghastly comet had stood as his single greatest triumph; now it wasn't a triumph anymore. Now it was largely a failure, in his mind, anyway. Just like that. White had become black. He had lived for months full of contradictions of conscience. Had he brought about the doctor's death, or had he tried to prevent it? And never mind that— had he tried to prevent it, or had he attempted to fool himself into thinking he had? He couldn't abide the notion of working to fool himself. That was the avenue to madness. So here, in an instant, all was effaced. The doctor was apparently alive after all and embarked on some sort of murderous rampage. St. Ives hadn't been thorough enough. What Narbondo wanted was a good long hanging.
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br />   And on top of that was the confounding realization that there wasn't an easier way to learn what we had to learn. St. Ives knew no one in the wilds of Norway. He couldn't just post a letter asking whether a frozen hunchback had been pulled from a lake and revived. He had to find out for himself. I think he wondered, though, whether he hadn't ought simply to have sent Hasbro about the business, or me, and stayed behind in Sterne Bay.

  We were in Trondheim, still hurtling northward, when the news arrived about the sinking of the other two ships, just below where the first had disappeared. Iron-hulled vessels, they'd gone down lickety-split, exactly the same way. The crew had abandoned the first one, but not the second. Ten men were lost in all. It had been Godall who sent the cable to Norway. He had prevailed upon the prime minister to take action.

  St. Ives was furious with himself for having done nothing to prevent the debacle.

  What could he have done, though? That's what I asked him. It was useless to think that he could have stopped it. Part of his fury was directed at the government. They had been warned, even before Godall had tackled them. Someone— Higgins, probably—had sent them a monumental ransom note. They had laughed it away, thinking it a hoax, even though it had been scrawled in the same hand as had Captain !

  Bowker's note, and warned them that more ships would be sunk. The Royal Academy should have urged them to take it seriously, but they had mud on their faces by now, and had hesitated. All of them had been fools.

  Shipping now was suspended in the area, from the mouth of the Thames to Folkestone, at an inconceivable expense to the Crown and to private enterprise. Half of London trade had slammed to a halt, according to Godall. It was a city under siege, and no one seemed to know who the enemy was or where he lay . . .St. Ives was deadly silent, frustrated with our slow travel northward, with the interminable rocky landscape, the fjords, the pine forests.